Terry and Holden Aberhart chat with Warren Bills on connecting agriculture with food and health in the context of COVID Crisis spring 2020.
A shopper can tell you where the strawberries came from. Ask them about the wheat in the bread they bought the same morning and there is nothing. It is a line in an ingredient list, and the farm behind it has no name.
Warren Bills has spent his career in agricultural technology and has spent a good deal of it thinking about that gap. This conversation, recorded in the spring of 2020, works outward from a season when families were suddenly cooking every meal at home and paying attention to what was in it.
What's Inside
- What a forced slowdown did to household spending, cooking and routine, and what some of it was worth keeping
- Home economics as it used to mean something wider than cooking, covering money, nutrition and self-reliance
- Why broadacre crops are invisible at the grocery store while fresh produce carries an identity, and what that costs producers
- Reading sugar content on a label with a child standing beside you, and what that changes about how you buy
- Where plant-based protein actually comes from, and which Western Canadian crops are in it
- The case for transparency and options rather than fear-based marketing on either side of the argument
- What an executive program in Silicon Valley showed him about personalized nutrition, wearable sensors and where food technology is going
- His own stated purpose, which is closing three gaps at once between agriculture, food and health
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